Red Moon (6 page)

She tries to smile at the woman behind the register—tries not to wince when she jars her wrist with the backpack, lifting it onto the counter—and when she has finished paying, nearly a third of her money spent, she says thank you in a voice that needs a glass of water.

She heads toward town, the cluster of buildings and trees a half mile down the road, the only variation in a landscape otherwise sprawling with corn and soybeans. This is the kind of country, her father used to say, where you could watch your dog run away for three days. Used to say. Because he wouldn’t say again. He wouldn’t say anything ever again. Neither would her mother. The dead didn’t speak. She knows she will never see them again.

The day is warming up and she is thankful when she steps into the shade thrown by the knuckly oak trees lining this main street, the older Victorian and Colonial homes set back on browning lawns. The occasional car whooshes by, but otherwise, it seems like a quiet place, where nothing horrible could ever happen. The houses are soon replaced by small businesses. Next to a steepled church sits a small park with paths running through it and a play structure in its center. The trees are big here, some of their gnarled branches as wide as a man’s middle. She circles them, collecting several smaller branches knocked down by the wind. Two girls in bright floral dresses play on the swings while their mother watches. At a nearby picnic table, an older woman, dressed in black rags, rocks back and forth, the town crazy. Claire finds a bench and scares off a squirrel before taking a seat. Out of her bag she pulls the ibuprofen. She pinches the bottle between her thighs and clumsily pulls off the cap, then punches through the foil and washes down three pills with a gulp of Coke.

Next she withdraws a wolf T-shirt and duct tape. She takes off her jacket and slides back her shirtsleeve to the elbow. Over her arm she pulls the T-shirt, a child’s small, running her thumb through a sleeve and her fingers through the neck, flopping the shirt over several times, wrapping the material tight around her arm.

She then lays the sticks across her forearm, two of them pressed tightly together, hoping to make a splint. But when she reaches for the duct tape, her arm wobbles and the sticks fall out of place. And when she tries the duct tape, using her fingers, and then her teeth, to unpeel a long strip of tape, she only ends up tearing and twisting it. “Damn it,” she says and almost hurls the tape away to strike a squirrel or robin. It’s heavy in her hand, as though made of metal, and she bets it could do some damage. That might make her feel better.

Instead she looks around for help. The mother and her children are already gone, the girls skipping down a distant sidewalk, which leaves the old woman sitting ten yards away, staring off into nothing, rocking back and forth as though lost in the rhythm of a prayer.

“Excuse me,” Claire says. The woman makes no response, so she yells this time, “Excuse me!”

The woman goes still and glances in Claire’s direction. She could be fifty or could be seventy—it is hard to tell. Her hair is dishwater gray and cut choppily around her ears, her skin deeply wrinkled from too much sun. Claire says, “I need some help. Can you help me?”

The woman nods and mutters something under her breath, then rises with some difficulty and totters like a vulture over to where Claire sits. An unwashed smell comes off her. Her eyes appear filmed completely over with cataracts. And her smile, if that’s what it is, has holes in it from her missing teeth. “Need help,” she says, her voice like a rusty hinge. “I can help. What help do you need? Tell me. Tell me.”

“What’s your name?”

The woman says her name is Strawhacker, Ms. Strawhacker, and Claire addresses her as such and explains what to do, how to slowly spin the duct tape around the splint, beginning at her elbow, moving forward to her wrist, finally knotting it between her thumb and forefinger.

“Why not a doctor?” The woman, Strawhacker, touches Claire’s knee. “A doctor is what you need, dear. A good cast. Not sticks and tape.”

“That’s not an option,” she says in a dead voice that quiets the woman, makes her peer around and lick her lips and finally say all right, all right. How she can see, Claire doesn’t know, the cataracts like puddles of old milk. Her knuckles are swollen, but she moves nimbly enough, uncurling the tape, around and around Claire’s arm, making a mummy of her. “Like this?” the woman says, speaking to herself. “Yes. Yes. Good.” Claire tells her to do it again, and then again, three times over, until her arm feels properly armored.

When they are finished, Claire pulls her sleeve down, so that the only visible part of the makeshift cast is a silvery mitten with a bit of white padding peeking out from beneath.

“There now,” Strawhacker says. “Not bad.”

Claire thanks her and expects Strawhacker to leave, to return to her picnic table and resume her rocking trance, but she does not. She remains seated on the bench, staring at Claire with her milky eyes, smiling softly. Then she reaches out a hand and lays it on hers, a hand as dry as paper. At first Claire thinks she means to shake, to wish her well. Instead she says, “Your fortune?”

“Excuse me?”

“I can tell it. I tell fortunes. With cards, tea leaves, palms. Would you like that? For me to read your fortune? Something to pass the time.”

“I guess.”

“Yes, because everyone likes to hear their fortune. Everyone does.” She begins to run a fingernail along Claire’s palm, tracking the lines. “But once your future is spoken, you cannot stop it from happening.”

Then no, Claire decides, wrenching away her hand and tucking it into her armpit as though scalded. She’d rather not. Thank you.

It’s easier not to think about the future—it’s easier to think of her palm as blank. The future is an ambush. The future is pain and absence. She has decided she can only bear to look a mile down the road, to think in terms of minutes instead of years. What am I going to eat, where am I going to sleep, how am I going to escape the rain? That’s the only future she’s interested in right now.

The woman leans closer, her hair a nest around her shriveled face. “Will you at least tell me your sign, then?”

“Aries.”

Her face bunches up in a smile and she pats Claire on the thigh and stands wobbling upright. “That’s good,” she says. “This will be a good month for Aries. Your planet is in a good place.”

Then it strikes Claire, the answer. She prays fiercely that she is right. The lines on her palm like the lines in the sky. The lines of a constellation. She hurries the letter out of her jacket pocket and unfolds it, smooths out its wrinkles with her palm. Her mind is like a spider weaving together the dots on the page with gossamer threads, uniting them as constellations. Yes. She doesn’t know why she didn’t recognize them before. Probably because she was out of her head with pain and fear and grief and exhaustion, but also because the constellations appear so out of context on lined paper, black instead of bright, small instead of far-flung in the night.

She rips a pen out of its packaging and begins to connect the dots, sketch out their designs. Grus. Octans, Taurus. What they mean, she doesn’t know. But at least a trapdoor has opened in the sky and she was lucky enough to fall through it.

In her excitement, Claire has forgotten about the old woman, who hobbles closer and gestures with her crooked hand. “What are you drawing, dear?”

“My future,” Claire says.

W
ALT PULLS ASIDE
the curtain and cups his hands around his eyes and leans into the dark window. Something has spooked the cattle. His hearing isn’t what it used to be, he’ll admit, which means they must be making quite the ruckus if he can make out their mewling and bawling over the television. His breath fogs the window and he swipes a hand through it, smearing his vision of the night. He cannot see anything, not from here, but beyond the barn and the corrals, dust rises like smoke through the blue cone of light thrown by the sodium-vapor lamp. He imagines he can feel a tremor in the air, hooves thudding in the pasture.

There. Three sharp barks. Followed by yammering. Coyotes. This sort of thing happens often enough—the coyotes seeming to outnumber people in Central Oregon—that he isn’t concerned so much as he is annoyed. Beyond the barn stands a whitewashed coop fenced in by chicken wire that runs three feet into the ground to keep the coyotes from digging their way in after prowling near for a sniff. He imagines coyotes, like gray phantoms, circling the enclosure, and the chickens clucking in a panic, nervously fluttering their wings, filling the coop with a cloud of thrown feathers.

He could take a rifle out on the porch, fire three rounds into the sky. Or stamp down the steps and into the night to pursue any that linger near the coop, the barn. But he has had a long day—leading cattle down the chute, punching them with a vaccination gun—and up until a moment ago he was half-asleep in his La-Z-Boy, sipping a tumbler of bourbon, watching Fox News.

The last thing he wants to do is pull on his boots, zip up his jacket, head into the cold that made his nose run and his hands numb all day. He hired on a gang of Mexicans to help. To usher the cattle from the holding pen to the chute, to tighten the sidebars, to thrust the vaccine into the cows’ rumps—Scourguard 3KC to boost immunity before calving, Ivomec Plus for liver flukes, intestinal worms. The men’s faces were reddened from the weather when they waved their arms and clapped their hands and zapped the cows with electric prods—the cows snorting and trotting away from them, kicking up clods of dirt, stacking up at the far end of the lot.

That’s all there is anymore for help—Mexicans. Used to be, he kept a hired man who lived on-site in a trailer. Then, ten years ago, when he hit sixty, when he decided to run for city council, he sold four hundred acres and as many head of cattle. His driveway is still flanked by pine columns with the Bar J brand chiseled into them, but as a hobby he keeps only a small herd on his twenty acres. When he needs help—with shots, with calving, with bucking alfalfa—he advertises in the classifieds, and the only ones who call have those drawn-out vowels, those sentences like songs he has trouble deciphering. “I don’t understand. Slower this time,” he often hears himself saying.

The window has fogged over again. He lets the curtain swing shut. He flips on a tableside lamp, and then another, not liking how dark the living room suddenly feels, the pine paneling soaking up the light. He falls back into his recliner and pulls over his lap a stars-and-stripes blanket. He sips at his bourbon until the ice cubes rattle against his teeth and his face feels flushed. On television he half tunes in to the familiar footage of the planes and then the goddamn president giving another goddamn speech instead of
doing
something.

Walt knows what he’d do. Right after the attacks, he brought to the city council an emergency proposal that would make public every registered lycan. Put it in the papers, he’d said. Put it on the Internet. Put it on their IDs, for God’s sake. That was the real no-brainer, something that had been discussed for years without success, a slot on the driver’s license, right next to blue eyes and brown hair: lycan.

We need to know who we’re up against, he’d said. It was a bluff, completely illegal. He knew the needle-dick mayor would try to shame him. But he felt he needed to say what everybody else was too chickenshit to admit: humans and animals don’t mix and it was time to build some fences between the two, go back to the old ways. The
Oregonian
ran a condemning piece about Walt alongside the worst photo in world history, him with his mouth open, a gaping black hole to match his shadowy pocketed eyes.

There comes a high-pitched bawling from outside. The noise a cow makes when dehorned or branded, when their black muzzles lift to the sky and their eyes bulge and roll back in their heads. Walt feels seized by it and goes utterly still as though waiting for the pain that caused the sound to arrive.

Then it dies out. Walt utters a long string of curses and with some effort kicks down the leg rest and stands up, nearly tripping in the tangle of his blanket. He kicks it away and scrambles for the remote on the end table. He punches the power button. The image of the newscast falls into darkness. He can see himself reflected on the screen, standing and holding out the remote like a drawn pistol. His eyes are crinkled and buried in the folds of his face. His nose is like the head of a hammer. His hair is buzzed down to a silver brush. He might be old, but he can still do some damage. You bet.

He drops the remote on the chair and heads to the kitchen. He could never find anybody worth marrying—that’s what he said whenever asked what’s kept him single all these years—but his home has no piles of rank laundry, no empty beer bottles lined up on the counter or stacks of dirty dishes moldering in the sink. The world is too messy; he wants his life clean. A place for everything and everything in its place: that was another thing he said.

So he knows exactly where to find what he’s looking for, in this case a handgun. He keeps weapons throughout the house—a .22, three revolvers, even his father’s World War II bayonet—the nearest handgun hidden behind the cereal in the cupboard, a loaded S&W .357. He thumbs off the safety and snaps the lock on the door and swings it open. The noise comes rushing out of the night to greet him. Coyotes babbling. Hens squawking. Horses and cattle shrieking.

In his surprise he brings the handgun to his ear. He hesitates a moment, one foot out the door, the other anchoring him to the kitchen. Then he casts off his surprise and joins the din by screaming, not a curse, but a garbled cry of anger. He stomps down the steps and along the path that leads to the barn, the ground biting his bare feet. In his hurry he has forgotten his boots and jacket. His breath clouds from his mouth—he is panting—but otherwise he feels oblivious to the cold. Warm even, with two tumblers of bourbon sloshing inside him.

The moon hangs in the sky like a skull. In its pale light he circles the barn. Its panels shake, as if the building is stirring to life, from where the horses kick in their stalls. The noise—a zoo of noise—is such that he cannot think, can concentrate only on dragging his feet forward, maintaining his grip on the revolver. The air smells like alfalfa and musk and something sharper: copper.

Next to the holding pen, a forty-by-forty-foot square encased by a split-rail fence, the sodium-vapor lamp hangs in the sky like a second moon. He lifts the bar to the gate and pushes his way into the holding pen and stumbles across the uneven, hoof-pocked ground. Earlier today he left behind a red heifer with a pale face who is too old to calf and who will be trucked off tomorrow to slaughter. No longer. Now, against the far edge of the pen, she lies on her side, her broad back to him. The ground is soft and steaming with her blood. His bare feet squelch through the mud to examine her. Two hundred and fifty pounds of packaged beef—gone.

Walt has always been sensitive to high-pitched sounds. The coyotes are howling, their howls merging into one distressing note that trembles the air and sends Walt reeling. He drops to one knee to observe the heifer’s torso rent open, her slatted ribs like long teeth grinning at him from a bloody mouth. He remembers one afternoon when—after he lifted her tail and pushed his gloved hand into her, after he reached around the hot emptiness and determined she wasn’t carrying again, after he released her—she kicked the sidebars hard enough to dent the metal. No matter how old she was, she still had fight in her. A pack of coyotes couldn’t have done this.

To steady himself he rests a hand on her sledgehammer-shaped head. The fading warmth of it makes him realize for the first time the cold. Maybe it is this that makes the revolver shake in his hand when he aims it into the darkness. His breath puffs out of him in white scarves. And he realizes that the night has gone quiet except for the lamp buzzing overhead.

He does not hear the whispering tread of footsteps moving through cheatgrass or the groaning complaint of wood as something large clambers up the side of the corral, but he notices the shift in the light, and when he finally turns, the last thing he will see is the creature balanced on the fence post, like a gargoyle, its shape occulting the moon behind it.